In this extract we find one of the main characters stuck in a dream/nightmare-like state. It was interesting writing this as I have not previously attempted writing horror or suspense, and so these events merely unfolded as I coaxed my heart to race in an artificial state of fear, if that makes any sense. By closing my eyes, breathing calmly, and then imagining the worst possible place I could be, it helped to prepare myself in the right mood in order to empathise with the character.

Unpublished Work © 2009 Will Ooi. All Rights Reserved

I lie flat on my back on top of the blue ragged sleeping bag which has seemingly shrivelled and shrunken in my absence. I don’t bother uncurling it properly as I wish nothing more right now than to force myself to sleep, trying to, with intense determination, think nothing of how an over-creased lump of so-called waterproof material has developed directly beneath the bones of my lower vertebrae – evidently not doing its job properly given how my rain-soaked clothes are causing the wooden floorboards to squeak softly with moisture as I wriggle myself into an acceptably comfortable position.

Father Thomas is already asleep and, even with my own confused morals, I know better than to trouble him at this late hour for a towel, waking him while covered from head to toe in rain water, blood, and blotches of unidentifiable yet unquestionably rancid garbage dumpster residue. “Have some respect for a man of the cloth,” I think to myself, licking my dried and cracked metallic tasting lips.

My eyes closed and with both my hands behind my head, I know it’s going to be difficult to simply ‘drift off’. The undersides of my eyelids are still gravelly-red and black in colour and warmth as a soul-consuming combination of full moonlight and street lamps from outside the chapel beams in through the stained glass windows of Saints and heroes, and the slow-burning circular tablets of people’s prayers occupy the air with the bleeding black fragrance of wax.

I remove my right hand from its slowly numbing position under the small weak follicles that divide the hair on the back of my head from my neck and bring it up over my face as a shield over my disturbed and all-seeing shut eyes.

The redness beneath my eyelids disappears, replaced only with an artificial darkness of shadow puppet biblical proportions as the now-missing foundation of my makeshift pillow lowers my head, tilted, onto the floor’s late-night chill, sending a rush of cold feedback straight into the back of my skull. My right hand fails to move quickly enough to wrap the unwanted sources of light poking through the thin flaps of my eyelids – resulting in a return to the ghostly silent loneliness of the insomniac. This isn’t working.

I let out a sigh as I re-open my eyes, weakly giving in to the temptation of staring miserably at the criss-crossed supporting beams of the ceiling; the rafters gliding symmetrically into a tiny little square at the very tip, forming the building’s spire.

I swallow a gulp of saliva and feel it struggle its way down my mucous-lined sore throat as it becomes apparent that I am getting a cold; the mere thought of it brings out the hypochondriac within me – eliciting a cold feverish sweat to trickle down my suddenly very warm and very throbbing left temple. I can mentally track the trail of this single bead of sweat, oozing a path like an early sunrise snail crawling over the garden moss of my growing facial hair before it decides to evaporate on the sharp edge of jaw and earlobe. I angrily smack this part of my face more in spite than with any actual intention of self-cleanliness, knowing full well that the drop of perspiration, just like my chances of getting a decent night’s worth of sleep, is long gone.

Giving it one last shot, I turn my body so that I am lying on my left side; my ribs taking my weight and both my legs tucked on top of each other, bent and conflicting, so that I am now partaking in my own amateurish rendition of the foetal position. Sick of my tiredness, sick of my upcoming illness, I angle my eyebrows downwards to make a furrowed V-sign and slam shut my eyes, vowing to, under no circumstances, open them again until the sun is up and illuminating St. Michael and his colourful puzzle-pieced robes. I force myself to travel, anywhere, in my mind, and in doing so I feel pathetic in that my last refuge from the madness of the waking is to transport myself into the lunacy of coerced fantasy. But fuck, I need the rest.

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Mercifully, I ride on an initial wave of a floating sensation as the crumpled useless blue sleeping bag becomes smooth on my damp exposed flesh. The muscles of my jagged elbows begin to relax as the warmth of the veiny pulse on my temple envelopes first my face, followed soon after by my chest. I feel the heat of my boiling fever collapse down into the rest of my upper torso before spreading out into my limbs, my heart rate slowing down as I breathe in and out through my mouth. The air is no longer laced with the streaming thin waves of black candle smoke, and my taste buds enjoy a sweet wisp of clean undiluted oxygen so fresh it seems like I am on a different planet altogether.

Now I am in true darkness. Lying on a soft bed I try to decipher piece by piece the other details of these new surroundings of mine. The acceptance that I am 15 years old or thereabouts permeates my mind, my eyes spinning as they follow the motions of a slow rotating brown dust embellished ceiling fan that now replaces the square icon tip of the church’s spire, providing me with a cool room temperature and making redundant the puffy white feather down blanket neatly folded to my side.

I glance to my left with my eyes shut and am able to see the wall next to my bed; the small specks of blue painted stone protruding out in intricacy before disappearing under the thin lines of black shadow beneath large posters, held up by slightly hidden pieces of grey blu-tack on their corners. Footballers and rock bands and lead pencil sketches of dinosaurs.

In front of my feet stands a pale wooden bookshelf positioned a metre away from the corner to its left where the locked door to this room marks the end of the stuck-on shiny images. The roof of the bookshelf holds an unwanted cream-coloured lamp with a stained shade, and I know that it is missing a bulb, along with a few metres’ worth of tangled up telephone wire propping over the top edge an gently touching the roof of the top shelf.  The remainder of the bookshelf is filled with books and magazines of varying thicknesses, organised neatly and lovingly despite the barely visible layer of accumulated dust powdering the top side of their pages.

A long blue and white folded-up umbrella with a thin wooden grip-contoured handle sits in perfect precision and spacing in between the bookshelf and its neighbouring wardrobe, the latter of which props up its own corner and is yellowy-brown in colour and covered with unwanted and unremovable paper white torn remnants of ripped-off stickers. The doors of the wardrobe are shut, but I know that within it lies the in-descript long and short sleeve selections of a generic school uniform, sports label branded t-shirts, loose fitting faded jeans with torn stringy hems, and neatly folded running shorts and leather shoes with worn-out soles and animal-chewed laces.

To my and the wardrobe’s right is a desk covered with assorted stationary and organised piles of scrap pieces of paper with drawings and writings, and exercise books with dog-eared purple and black striped covers. The desk has two small drawers on its right beneath the main bench, both are shut but the top drawers hangs out slightly over the bottom, over-filled. Above the desk is a large window with drawn up horizontal lines of wind-crackling plastic blinds, through which I can make out a front garden with plenty of flowers I do not know the names of.

Right next to my face and further to the right of the desk where the window ends is a black fake wooden computer desk with a large black swivel chair obscuring the whites of the keyboard and the bottom of the obtuse monitor looking at me with its blackened bulgy reflective eye.  The swivel chair’s back support leans against the end of the wall, and my closed eyes are then redirected back to the ever-spinning ceiling fan and its three wing-like arms.

I hear the barking of two dogs from outside this room, one large and one small, increasing ever slightly in volume as I feel concern begin to build within me, rousing me slightly from my relaxed state. The barks are of distress and they drown out what sounds like the loud distant whispers of human shouting. The barks turn to whimpers as it becomes clear that the human voices belong to a man and a woman. A woman that is precious to me.

My feelings of slumber and peacefulness are now shrouded by a clenching fist of familiar dread as my chest starts to heave and I feel the rumblings of my lungs trying to cry out were it not for my overwhelming desire to remain in my own private silence and darkness.

Then I see it through my eyelids again. The fleshy red gravel and internal black flickering of light from an outside source. I dare not open my eyes now as the shouting gets louder and louder and I hear my name being called. Being screamed. “XXXX !!!”

The sinister colours on the insides of my lids now present themselves behind the blinded window, almost as if the terrifying fear I feel from outside the left hand door of the room is now forcing its way in through the right side. The sounds of footsteps somewhere between human feet and horse hooves are stomping closer from both sides as the lock on the doorknob begins to screw itself out and the windows slowly slide open with an unrelenting thunder shaking the blinds so hard they are straining to remain shut.

The single bead of sweat from my temple has returned, and I dare not open my eyes.

In my darkness I hear the doors of the wardrobe and the handles of the desk drawers and the flittering of the posters and the swivelling of the computer chair threaten and quake, and it is then that they rush out.

An army of cockroaches swarm from underneath all the shadows and crevices of the room; I see their feelers and black striped brown bodies tear through the blue painted walls, exploding out with the little pieces of crooked stone and powder. They pile on top of each other from behind the books on the shelf, from within the folded blue and white umbrella, from the pockets of the hung-up pairs of faded jeans, from the drawers of the desk and from underneath the soft white pillows propping up my heavy head. I feel their legs scupper on the hairs of my toes and the back of my ears and the undersides of my upper arms as the booming shouts from outside tear into my eardrums.

I topple over the side of the bed and onto the floor. I slam down on it hard and feel the cold wet wooden floor boards splinter my palms and kneecaps, but before the pain even sets in I feel them. They are stacking up on top of me, numbering in their thousands, baby ones and middle aged ones and old huge ones all mixed as one whole thriving mass of rapid motion.  The broken and shattered blue walls are sinking in their bodies and the ceiling fan merely sends more of them flying onto the back of my head and into my hair where they burrow deeply into my scalp. The screaming from within my own skull is all I hear as the individual sensations of their tiny feet on my body are now replaced with the shock of knowing they are in my mouth. They consume the moisture around my tongue. They resist the wild swinging of my limbs. They dig in under my eyelids, and the flickering red and black burnt into my retinas are now replaced by the blurry microscopic vision of the little legs scratching my eyeballs until all I can see is brown.

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Then blood red.
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Then white.
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The sun is up.
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St Michael’s robes are glowing with resplendent purple and orange and green. My gasps for air are interrupted by the build-up of phlegm in my throat, and breathing through my mouth only worsens the blockage of my nasal cavity. I jump to my feet and scratch and dig and scrape away at my neck and chest and legs in a fury of possessed fear.  In my frenzied spasms of unapologetic self-cleansing I slip sharply on the sweat-soaked blue sleeping bag and slam my face onto the old wooden floorboards, instantly causing my head to swell in a fire of nausea.

Eyes are closed. Eyes are open. Eyes closed. Eyes infiltrated by German cockroaches. And now, in no uncertain terms, eyes are most definitely closed.
Wandering off into an unexpected undefined amount of additional darkness, I hear Father Thomas say the words “Fookin’ ‘Ell,” in that deep Irish accent of his. I am conscious of the bloody mucous leaking out from my nostrils as I vow, this time, like a hypocrite, to never, ever, Ever, force myself to sleep again.

Photo courtesy of Anderson Missouri United Methodist Church

Unpublished Work © 2009 Will Ooi. All Rights Reserved